It was back on November 24, 2014 that I accepted Greg’s challenge to write 30 blog posts in 30 days. I’ve made it to day 30 and I’m still here, although I’m honestly more than a little tired and burnt out. Working for a retail company makes the Christmas holidays extremely stressful – the holiday peak is extremely important for every retailers balance sheet so there’s extra scrutiny around any technical issues whether they are actual or just perceived. I’ve heard horror stories of past holiday peaks so it appears that this holiday has been pretty successful. We had no major issues in our stores or on our websites and thankfully we didn’t have any major issues on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. We had a few challenges in one of our distribution centers thanks to ICMPv6 traffic flooding the network. Overall I’d like to think that I had something to-do with that success, probably not at as much as I’d like to take credit for. I’ve got a great team working for me so I need to credit them as well. I had been at my previous employer for 17 years and had the network infrastructure pretty well greased and running without issues, I’ve come to the realization that it’s going to take me a lot longer than 12 months to get the network infrastructure where I’d like it to be with my new employer.

As I mentioned when I started this challenge that I thought there might only be a handful of decent posts.

There were a few posts that I wrote but after I thought about them for a while I decided not to post them. I now work for a publicly traded company so I need to be mindful of not inadvertently publishing something that isn’t public knowledge – such as sales figures. I also work for a global retailer that’s been the target of some very intricate hacking attempts so I need to be mindful of what I reveal about our security posture. I have some stories from consulting engagements that would make great posts, but again I need to be mindful of my clients privacy even if I don’t name them outright. Especially if they are repeat clients which most of mine are.